Potentials and challenges of arts-based co-production in participatory health research: tackling the tension between cultivating the process and producing outputs that enhance well-being and health

Background
In participatory health research, university researchers and co-researchers with lived experience of illness aim to co-produce knowledge in order to enhance the health and well-being of relevant communities as well as contributing to the research field. The approaches often employ arts-based research methods to elicit experience-based, embodied knowing, in line with an expanded understanding of what counts as knowledge and whose knowledge counts. Despite the popularity of arts-based co-production in participatory health research, there is a dearth of detailed analyses of the potentials and challenges of using arts-based methods.
Aims
The aim is to provide insight into the potentials and challenges of using arts-based methods to co-produce knowledge in participatory health research. The focus is on how arts-based co-production elicits embodied knowing and with what consequences for the knowledge and other outputs generated.
Method
The method combines Bakhtin’s dialogue theory, Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge and discourse, Wetherell’s theory of affect and emotion, and work in arts-based research on embodied, aesthetic knowing. The method is applied in analysis of collaborative workshops in a participatory health research project about dance for people with Parkinson’s disease and their spouses.
Results
The main result is that potentials and challenges arise in the tension between creating meaningful relationships based on mutual caring among co-researchers and academic researchers and cultivating the creative, collaborative process and producing concrete knowledge-claims and outputs that contribute to sustainable community empowerment and research.
Conclusion
The paper will conclude with suggestions for how to further the potentials and tackle the challenges.